Friday, 5 October 2012

God is your Next-Door Neighbour

The mesmerising, magniloquent poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
continues to exert its almost religious influence over readers. Rilke makes an
entire world of meaning out of a personal vision, using religious language and
images.

The very valuable and, in my view, main achievement of this
book (In the company of Rilke : why a 20th-century visionary poet
speaks so eloquently to 21st-century readers yearning for
inwardness, beauty & spiritual connection, Stephanie Dowrick, Allen &
Unwin, 2009, ISBN 978-1-74237-180-1, RRP) is its description and commendation
of the reading of poetry as a satisfying and necessary practice, available to
anyone. Stephanie Dowrick identifies Rilke as gifted with ‘negative
capability’. I know of several interpretations of what Keats meant by ‘negative
capability’, and Dowrick herself definitely fits one of them: the ability to
objectify in words her own experiences. In this case, Dowrick’s experience of
reading poetry.

Poetry, its intimacy, its immediacy and intensity, its
“irrational truths”, are encountered, examined and praised. Dowrick is also
good on translation and what languages owe to one another, that translation is
a serious reciprocal arrangement. This takes on special force in her discussion
of Rilke’s use of Das Offene, where she argues persuasively for the
English word Open. Das Offene can mean the spaciousness of landscapes,
but also the space or inner-world, the silent communal space that courses
through all beings. His poems dwell on the inwardness of the soul, the inwardness
that narrative and psychology cannot categorise.

In ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ Rilke famously exclaims. “You
must change your life.” This is a fundamental challenge of the spiritual life
and Dowrick, who has made it her career business to teach spiritual lessons,
sees that “to change one’s life (one’s vision of life and therefore one’s
living of it) is not a choice; it has become inevitable.”

She shows how “Rilke achieves a reaarangement of our usual
concepts and limitations using a writing register that is far more often
sensual and emotional than it is abstract.” Granted, Dowrick does not use his
poetry as ‘scripture’, but her sustained seriousness can sometimes be too
reverent. Though she acknowledges that the poet was himself open to irreverent treatment,
when she quotes Auden’s brilliant depiction of Rilke as “The Santa Claus of
Solitude”, we are left with the sense that Stephanie is not amused.

Rilke is concentrated on God; Dowrick is fascinated with
Rilke’s God. Like Meister Eckhart and other mystical writers before and since,
Rilke finds new ways of talking about God.

You, Neighbour God, whom I often

rouse with loud knocks in the long nights,

I do this because I rarely hear you breathing,

and know: You are in the great room, alone.

And when you need something, no one’s there,

no one to bring drink to your outstretched hand.

The surprise of finding that God is your next-door
neighbour, and that he needs you as much as you need him, is one reason why we
go back to Rilke. Dowrick proceeds: “Rilke’s ‘God’ is … a vulnerable neighbour
one moment, like a ‘clump of a hundred roots’ the next; ‘an ancient work of
art’, then a much-needed ‘hand’, a cathedral, a dreamer. Absent here,
breath-close there; as often in darkness as in light.” There is a need for
popular conversations about God, however there is something frustratingly safe
and certain in Dowrick’s theology that cannot go unmentioned. She persistently
glosses over the problem of evil and suffering. And during discussion of
Rilke’s idea that an artist’s “responsibility” is to create God, she makes the
alarming assertion that “non-artists need religion; ‘God’ needs artists.” This
exclusive view of God in relation to humans needs to be tested further by
Dowrick, being an open invitation to all sorts of delusory behaviour. I would
begin with the simple claim that artists and non-artists all need God, without
distinction.

All said, this is a generous, purposive book that inspires
as well as informs, showing how Rilke can “shift one’s boundaries and
expectations about what writing can achieve” and even open “the exhilarating
prospect of what reading, as much as writing, may be for.” Peter Steele
said somewhere that, “the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina is
precious indeed. There is also such a thing as lectio humana – a
steeping of the soul in another soul, mediated by means of words in all their
fragility and vitality.” This book is an example of lectio humana, where
Stephanie Dowrick shows how poetry can be read, and how a poet like Rilke can
be interpreted, with a resultant deepening of our lived experience and
understanding.